


a prince without a country

by thedevilchicken



Category: Star Stealing Prince
Genre: Adventure, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-11
Updated: 2018-09-11
Packaged: 2019-07-11 05:56:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15966107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: Snowe goes adventuring. Apparently, even after Sabine, he can't escape the winter.





	a prince without a country

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NightsMistress](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/gifts).



> Be warned: this completely ignores the contents of the sequel novels and picks up after the good ending of SSP!

Snowe wondered again, later, whether he was still really a prince. 

The way he saw it, there were two major issues with his ongoing princehood: 1) he didn't have a kingdom to be the prince of, now that they'd left the island (and it was probably all frozen over anyway, now he thought about it), and 2) no one remembered he'd ever been their prince in the first place, except the ones who'd been unwillingly roped into his parents' nutso plans (and the demon that was still rattling around inside him, too, but he tried not to think about that). 

The townspeople remembered him as the odd guy who'd made the odd speech in the town hall that day, and then helped them to keep from freezing to death. They didn't remember how happy they'd been before that, despite the snow and despite Snowe, though he supposed that had all been a really terrible lie. But he had to admit, he missed Sabine. He missed his room and the guards and the Magic Helpers, though they'd been kind of rude to him toward the end. He missed the neat little houses and all the books he couldn't read, and how people just let him come and go and dust their stuff sometimes. So much time had seemed to pass without time passing at all. All the village kids had really been older than he was.

He missed Sabine, but he didn't miss the snow. It had been so cold there sometimes and it had just kept on getting colder toward the end, though he guessed that had kinda been his fault for screwing things up so badly. Not that he'd started it, or that he'd known what he was doing. It had turned out his parents had had some really screwy ideas about how to treat people, like the villagers, and Relenia, and Astra and Hiante and Erio, except he wasn't totally sure that Hiante didn't prefer being reanimated to just plain being dead and Erio was a demon so maybe being summoned was just something they expected? They'd never really talked, at least not about demon culture and stuff like that, so Snowe really couldn't say. All he knew was is was safer to assume his parents had screwed everyone over because, on the whole, they kinda had. 

He didn't miss the snow, but it made sense that they couldn't escape winters completely. Snowe found he still liked to explore - the townspeople tried to make him feel welcome for the things he'd done to help them but he knew that most of them still felt uneasy, so he tried to just come back there for supplies and maybe a bed for a few nights in the new inn that they made. The rest of the time, he packed his knapsack and he put on his cloak and he went out to explore, and it was so exciting to find new places now that they'd escaped the island! There were caves and cliffs and rocky beaches and, in the distance, in the mist, there were mountains that looked taller than any that he'd seen before. He decided to visit them. He supposed it might take time, but time was something he had lots of.

His breath fogged in the air as he came closer to them, towering above him. Frost on leaves crunched underfoot between the trees. Then, as he pitched his tent one night in a clearing in the foothills, the air began to fill with snow. He still had the mittens that he'd gotten from the snowmen in Sabine, and he'd been wearing them to keep out the cold, but he took them off to hold out his bare hands and feel the flakes that melted on his fingers and his palms. It reminded him of Sabine. It reminded him of home, and crackling fires, and smiling faces, back when he'd still been their prince and they'd all been pleased to see him. He wished it hadn't all just been a cover-up for such awful, awful things. Erio said his parents had been a couple of self-absorbed dicks, not to put too fine a point on it, and he guessed that having met them when they'd gone into the Sepulcher, well, he couldn't really disagree.

He went on in the morning, in his warm red cloak and his toasty mittens. There were no snowmen there to talk to, so he made a few along the way with branches and pine cones and things he found in nearby caves. They didn't want to talk at first but he started getting better at the magic, like he was lighting little fires inside them till they couldn't keep their mouths shut. He wondered if someone else had done the same for the ones back on the island and if maybe they were still there, and now always would be. But his snowmen made the journey less lonely - though a whole lot more sarcastic - when all he had to do was stick his head outside the tent to have a conversation, but soon the snow was too thick and heavy for him to build many more. They kept getting lost in the snow drifts, and pretty soon he ran out of spare cozy mantles.

The higher he went, the less use his tent was. He slept in caves through the long nights, though really he'd never gotten the hang of sleeping deeply, not the way some people seemed to, not like Astra when she let Erio chase all her nightmares away. He tried to move on in the daylight hours, with his cloak pulled tight around him, up to his knees in the drifts, but something seemed to draw him ever closer. Whatever magic there was in him felt it. 

"I probably wouldn't go that way," Numismatist told him when he'd settled into a cave one night, popping up out of the dark and making him jump up halfway to the ceiling. "You can't save them, you know. I don't think they're completely dead, because I'm pretty sure I can't go over there. But they're not completely alive, either." 

Snowe frowned at her, in the light from his flaming torch that didn't do very much to illuminate her, ghostly as she was. And he definitely didn't think about how it was that she was in the cave there with him. He'd had enough nightmares in his life without considering what her presence meant about the place where he was trying to sleep, though he had to admit he was strangely glad to see her. It was like a little piece of home was right there with him.

A couple of days later, he made it up to the head of the trail, his teeth chattering in the whipping wind. He stood between two peaks and he looked down into the valley beyond, and he understood what Numismatist had said to him: there were houses there with huge icicles hanging down from the corners of their roofs, and a great frozen lake, and people, except no one seemed to move at all. They were frozen solid where they stood. Whatever magic he had in him felt the magic that had frozen them and he couldn't help but think that someone like his parents must have done it. He'd hoped they'd been the only ones - King Edgar and Queen Lina, and the Original King they’d stolen from - but he knew the demon he still had inside of him would have laughed at him for that, if it had just been able to. 

That night, he lit a fire in a hearth and he slept in a house for the first time in weeks, though curled up on a dusty rug and not tucked up in a frozen person's bed. The next day, he explored the town, the houses and the shops and and the little town hall, and a manor with a library full of books in the same languages he'd seen before but couldn't speak. The day after, he built snowmen, and they talked to him, and he understood; they taught him the words to read the books and learn the spells, and improve. Many days after that, so many he lost count, he sat down in the snow and he closed his eyes and concentrated - it was delicate work, but he had to think his flames could heal as well as burn. He lit tiny fires inside those frozen people and they woke up, just like the snowmen had. They remembered everything.

When the people asked him who he was, he almost called himself _Prince Snowe_ , but he knew he didn't have a kingdom anymore. He found he didn't mind that, not at all, not when they made him welcome. They didn't find him weird and maybe they weren't quite sure about his friend the ghost, but she seemed to grow on them like she had on him somewhere along the way. And when they told him stories all about the snowy queen who'd frozen them to make herself immortal, he said he'd stay, at least long enough to keep them safe. 

He didn't need to be anyone's prince for him to save them. They didn't need to know him for him to want to help. And there would always be more snow, he thought, wherever he went, but he wondered if maybe the thaw was exactly what his magic was made for.


End file.
